Getting Started
Explore how building a habit of learning in public through writing, speaking, and sharing knowledge can accelerate your growth as a software engineer. Learn to document your process, engage online communities, and develop content that benefits both your current and future self, while building valuable connections and resilience.
How you can learn in public
Make it a habit to create “learning exhaust” as a non-negotiable and automatic side effect of your own learning.
- Write demos, blogs, tutorials, and cheat sheets
- Speak at meetups and conferences
- Ask and answer questions on Stack Overflow or Reddit
- Make YouTube videos or Twitch streams
- Start a newsletter
- Draw cartoons (people love cartoons!)
Document everything
Make the thing you wish you had found when you were learning. Document what you did and the problems you solved. Organize what you know and then open source your knowledge.
Be helpful on the Internet
You make a lot of friends when you are helpful on the Internet. It is surprisingly easy to beat Google at its own game of organizing the world’s information. Even curating a structured list of information is helpful.
I once put together a list of every Web performance test tool on a whim, and it got circulated for months! People reshared my list and even helped fill it out.
“But I’m not famous; nobody will read my work!”
— you, probably
Resist the immediate bias for attention
Don’t judge your results by retweets, stars, or upvotes — just talk to yourself from three months ago. Resist the immediate desire for attention. Your process needs to survive regardless of attention if it is to survive at all. Eventually, recognition will come. But by far, the biggest beneficiary of helping you in the past will be you in the future. If (when) others benefit, that’s the icing on the cake.
This is your time to suck. When you have no following and no personal brand, you also have no expectations weighing you down. You can experiment with different formats, and domains. You can take your time to get good. Build the habit. Build your platform. Get comfortable with your writing/content creation process. Ignore the peer pressure to become an “overnight success.” Even “overnight successes” went through the same thing you are.
Pick up what others put down
I get it: We all need feedback. If you want guaranteed feedback, pick up what others put down. Respond to and help your mentors with things they want, and they’ll respond to you in turn. Although, sooner or later, you’ll have to focus on your needs instead of others. Then, you’re back to square one, having to develop intrinsic drive instead of relying on external motivation.